It’s one of the Champions League’s most infamous superstitions. When your team walks out for the final, however tempted you might be, however shiny it may look, DO NOT TOUCH THE TROPHY. Don’t even think about it. You haven’t earned the right, and merely to brush it with a fingertip would be an act of bewildering arrogance begging for punishment by the fates. Instead, exercise a little self-control, find a way to win the game… and then grab that glittering prize with both hands.
No wonder things can get a little crazy once Ol’ Big Ears has been secured.
Phil Thompson remembers exactly how itchy he felt at the end of the 1981 showpiece. A tense, long season of hard work had finished in triumph and the Liverpool captain was eyeing up the trophy like a magpie. And who can blame him? The post-match ceremony may seem like a symbolic flourish, but Thompson was about to engage in a tradition dating back to ancient Greece, when tropaion, victory monuments fashioned from weapons and armour, were erected on the battlefield. Or, as he put it, “Give me the f***ing cup – this is my moment!”
That was no inner monologue either. The Reds had just beaten Real Madrid 1-0 at the Parc des Princes and Thompson was desperate to lift the silverware, only for some suited older gentleman to get his hands on it first. “When I went to collect the cup,” he told the Daily Mail, “this UEFA dignitary started to lift it himself rather than let me pick it up … I think he was a bit taken aback by the swearing, but it worked.”
So invested was he in the celebration that Thompson even calculated the best way to show the trophy off for the cameras. “You realise you need to lift it low down on the ears and then lift it so it gets your beaming smile,” he said – a stark contrast to his team-mate David Fairclough, who regrets not milking the limelight after the 1978 decider. “I wish I’d held it a bit more as I don’t have that many pictures of me with the European Cup,” the forward later explained. “It’s so heavy that, after a game, you’d have been knackered and it’s just, ‘Pass it on. I am not hogging it because the bloody thing weighs a ton.’”
The heft of the object itself (7.5kg, to be precise) is also a lingering detail for Aitor Karanka, a three-time Champions League winner with Madrid. “The memory we all have of when you pick up the European Cup is how much it weighs,” he told Champions Journal. “When you hold it, the weight of what it means comes together with the physical weight, and it does surprise you. Most of the time, because of the weight or the fact we all wanted the cup, you’d have two of us carrying it together. You go passing it around, and to hold that trophy in front of the fans and your family, it’s the culmination of a dream. I get emotional just thinking about it.”
Karanka recalls embracing the trophy after the 2000 final at the Stade de France, and its plump curves provoked a similar gesture from Henrik Larsson at the same stadium six years later – possibly a natural reaction in the so-called ‘city of love’. “I remember walking out and giving it a kiss before Puyi [Carles Puyol] lifted the trophy,” said Larsson, the Swedish striker having come on to help Barcelona turn the tide against Arsenal. “I actually have a painting back home from when I’m leaning forward and kissing it.”
So far, so respectable, but once the trophy leaves the stadium… well, anything can happen. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but I took it with me to the VIP Room,” is how Ludovic Giuly tells the tale of that same evening in 2006, Barcelona’s French winger having hauled the silverware on a clandestine venture to a swanky Parisian nightclub. “[The owner] Jean-Roch is a friend of mine, and I’d promised him I’d bring the entire squad to his club if we won. So not only did I bring the squad, but I brought the trophy too. A couple of players were still in their kits.” And nor was this the first time the trophy had visited a lively hotspot in the French capital, a few Liverpool players having dragged it along to the Moulin Rouge in 1981 – “to show the dancing girls”, in Thompson’s words.
Where the trophy ultimately winds up after the party is the stuff of legend too. Once the last song has been played and all the champagne quaffed, someone needs to take care of it until morning. For years, the story was that Steven Gerrard slept with it in his bed after Liverpool’s remarkable comeback in the 2005 final, but he has since insisted their night together was far more chaste. “It was in the same room as me,” he said. “It wasn’t in the bed with the quilt on it, but it was in the room, so… however you want to read into that, really.”
In contrast, former AC Milan CEO Adriano Galliani has been more forthcoming about his own dalliance with the cup in 1994 – and having almost lost it while he and coach Fabio Capello put a boozy cap on their 4-0 defeat of Barcelona. “Capello and I stayed up late, drinking bottles of wine, and we forgot about the cup,” he said. “We were in the elevators and we spotted it in a garbage bag. A maid must have put it in there. We brought it back to the room, I put it in my bed and I slept beside it. I told my wife the next morning that it was the most beautiful sleep I’d ever had.”
If that was a close call, Liverpool feared they actually had lost the trophy in 1981.
“It wasn’t missing – it was always in safe hands,” comes the retort from that man again, Phil Thompson. The Reds skipper had been rebuked for leaving the English League Cup on the team bus two months before, and club secretary Peter Robinson told him he should have taken it home. “So, when we won the European Cup, I didn’t need telling twice.”
Maybe… but that doesn’t explain why Thompson took it on a detour to his local pub once the squad had paraded the silverware around the city. “I threw the European Cup in the boot of my car, a Ford Capri. I drove to Kirkby and went to The Falcon, where I used to run the Sunday League football team. Imagine that being allowed to happen now! When I got to The Falcon, we moved all the pub-team trophies to one side and put the European Cup in pride of place behind the bar after everyone had held it.
“Everyone was queuing up at the pub payphone to ring around and tell their mates to come down and see the European Cup. The next morning, I was woken up by Peter Robinson asking where the cup was. The reason was because it was needed at a press conference at Anfield. Thankfully, even though I was bleary-eyed, I’d remembered to take it home with me.”
That instinct to ferry the trophy to friends and loved ones is a common impulse. It’s how the cup ended up at the grave of venerated coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi in 2003, for example. AC Milan forward Andriy Shevchenko felt he owed his mentor a debt after so nearly firing Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv team all the way in 1998/99, and here was the next best thing.
“I took the Champions League trophy to Kyiv because we came very close to playing the final and, with a bit more luck, and maybe a bit more experience, we could have won,” the Ukraine star explained, Lobanovskyi having passed away the previous year. “I knew it was his dream and, when I won, I felt he’d done a lot for me.”
Likewise, Celtic manager Jock Stein had one man in his thoughts after beating Inter in the 1967 final, the first outing of the current, redesigned trophy. Once back in Glasgow, Stein was quick to present the spoils of victory to Jimmy Gribben – the club scout who had brought Stein to Celtic from Llanelli in 1951, when the then defender feared he was destined to return to life as a coal miner. “What a wonderful thing that Gribben should be there last night to share in the glory and that the great-hearted Stein, hard on the outside but soft and considerate at the core, should remember him with the bear-like hug,” wrote the Scottish Sunday Express. “This was the pay-off to a perfect night.”
Fittingly, given Stein’s past down the pits, the manager and his Lisbon Lions also paraded the trophy around Celtic Park on the back of a coal lorry – one of the stranger homecoming celebrations in European Cup history but all the more quintessential for it. Think of it as a mathematical equation: the less glamorous the parade, the more jarring the sight of club football’s greatest prize. Either way, giving the fans back home a look at the trophy is an integral part of the experience, and it certainly stuck with Dietmar Hamann when an exhausted, elated Liverpool team returned from the ‘Miracle of Istanbul’ in 2005, even if the cup they wielded had a dented handle after (as folklore has it) Milan Baroš dropped it while cavorting on a piano.
“Bringing the trophy back for the first time in 21 years was just why you play the game,” explained the German midfielder. “When you look at people from five years old to 90 years old in the face – some of them had tears running down their cheeks – that’s what sticks with you. That was probably the most memorable moment I take from those few days in Istanbul and then on the way back. That’s what makes it so special.”
Special too are the personal reflections. The pubs, clubs and piano hijinks might be primo headline fodder, but the most touching trophy tales are the realisations of a private dream. Take Javier Zanetti, for instance, who captained Inter to glory in 2010, a full 18 years after beginning his senior career. “When I lifted the trophy, lots of memories came to mind,” said the Nerazzurri veteran. “All my years at Inter, which ultimately led me to being able to lift that trophy as captain. I was finally able to make all my fans happy, and that, for me, is priceless.”
There is one celebration which undoubtedly stands out above the rest, however – the cathartic triumph of Éric Abidal’s trophy moment in 2011. It was a near miracle that the Frenchman was even involved, Barcelona’s left-back having undergone surgery on a cancerous liver tumour just over two months prior to the showpiece. Not only did Abidal recover, he played all 90 minutes of the 3-1 win against Manchester United at Wembley, and Barça skipper Carles Puyol duly accorded him the honour of raising the trophy first.
“He gave me the captain’s armband and said it was me who had to lift it to the sky,” Abidal later revealed. “He told me he’d spoken with everyone, with the other captains, the coach. At the beginning, I didn’t want to because I respect those players a lot, and I knew what this meant to the club. He helped me. It was something that impacted me on every level. It fills me with great pride to tell myself I was part of this group of players who’ve had the opportunity to lift that trophy ‘as a captain’.”
Perfect. Even those ancient Greek warriors would surely have dropped their shields and applauded that
It’s one of the Champions League’s most infamous superstitions. When your team walks out for the final, however tempted you might be, however shiny it may look, DO NOT TOUCH THE TROPHY. Don’t even think about it. You haven’t earned the right, and merely to brush it with a fingertip would be an act of bewildering arrogance begging for punishment by the fates. Instead, exercise a little self-control, find a way to win the game… and then grab that glittering prize with both hands.
No wonder things can get a little crazy once Ol’ Big Ears has been secured.
Phil Thompson remembers exactly how itchy he felt at the end of the 1981 showpiece. A tense, long season of hard work had finished in triumph and the Liverpool captain was eyeing up the trophy like a magpie. And who can blame him? The post-match ceremony may seem like a symbolic flourish, but Thompson was about to engage in a tradition dating back to ancient Greece, when tropaion, victory monuments fashioned from weapons and armour, were erected on the battlefield. Or, as he put it, “Give me the f***ing cup – this is my moment!”
That was no inner monologue either. The Reds had just beaten Real Madrid 1-0 at the Parc des Princes and Thompson was desperate to lift the silverware, only for some suited older gentleman to get his hands on it first. “When I went to collect the cup,” he told the Daily Mail, “this UEFA dignitary started to lift it himself rather than let me pick it up … I think he was a bit taken aback by the swearing, but it worked.”
So invested was he in the celebration that Thompson even calculated the best way to show the trophy off for the cameras. “You realise you need to lift it low down on the ears and then lift it so it gets your beaming smile,” he said – a stark contrast to his team-mate David Fairclough, who regrets not milking the limelight after the 1978 decider. “I wish I’d held it a bit more as I don’t have that many pictures of me with the European Cup,” the forward later explained. “It’s so heavy that, after a game, you’d have been knackered and it’s just, ‘Pass it on. I am not hogging it because the bloody thing weighs a ton.’”
The heft of the object itself (7.5kg, to be precise) is also a lingering detail for Aitor Karanka, a three-time Champions League winner with Madrid. “The memory we all have of when you pick up the European Cup is how much it weighs,” he told Champions Journal. “When you hold it, the weight of what it means comes together with the physical weight, and it does surprise you. Most of the time, because of the weight or the fact we all wanted the cup, you’d have two of us carrying it together. You go passing it around, and to hold that trophy in front of the fans and your family, it’s the culmination of a dream. I get emotional just thinking about it.”
Karanka recalls embracing the trophy after the 2000 final at the Stade de France, and its plump curves provoked a similar gesture from Henrik Larsson at the same stadium six years later – possibly a natural reaction in the so-called ‘city of love’. “I remember walking out and giving it a kiss before Puyi [Carles Puyol] lifted the trophy,” said Larsson, the Swedish striker having come on to help Barcelona turn the tide against Arsenal. “I actually have a painting back home from when I’m leaning forward and kissing it.”
So far, so respectable, but once the trophy leaves the stadium… well, anything can happen. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but I took it with me to the VIP Room,” is how Ludovic Giuly tells the tale of that same evening in 2006, Barcelona’s French winger having hauled the silverware on a clandestine venture to a swanky Parisian nightclub. “[The owner] Jean-Roch is a friend of mine, and I’d promised him I’d bring the entire squad to his club if we won. So not only did I bring the squad, but I brought the trophy too. A couple of players were still in their kits.” And nor was this the first time the trophy had visited a lively hotspot in the French capital, a few Liverpool players having dragged it along to the Moulin Rouge in 1981 – “to show the dancing girls”, in Thompson’s words.
Where the trophy ultimately winds up after the party is the stuff of legend too. Once the last song has been played and all the champagne quaffed, someone needs to take care of it until morning. For years, the story was that Steven Gerrard slept with it in his bed after Liverpool’s remarkable comeback in the 2005 final, but he has since insisted their night together was far more chaste. “It was in the same room as me,” he said. “It wasn’t in the bed with the quilt on it, but it was in the room, so… however you want to read into that, really.”
In contrast, former AC Milan CEO Adriano Galliani has been more forthcoming about his own dalliance with the cup in 1994 – and having almost lost it while he and coach Fabio Capello put a boozy cap on their 4-0 defeat of Barcelona. “Capello and I stayed up late, drinking bottles of wine, and we forgot about the cup,” he said. “We were in the elevators and we spotted it in a garbage bag. A maid must have put it in there. We brought it back to the room, I put it in my bed and I slept beside it. I told my wife the next morning that it was the most beautiful sleep I’d ever had.”
If that was a close call, Liverpool feared they actually had lost the trophy in 1981.
“It wasn’t missing – it was always in safe hands,” comes the retort from that man again, Phil Thompson. The Reds skipper had been rebuked for leaving the English League Cup on the team bus two months before, and club secretary Peter Robinson told him he should have taken it home. “So, when we won the European Cup, I didn’t need telling twice.”
Maybe… but that doesn’t explain why Thompson took it on a detour to his local pub once the squad had paraded the silverware around the city. “I threw the European Cup in the boot of my car, a Ford Capri. I drove to Kirkby and went to The Falcon, where I used to run the Sunday League football team. Imagine that being allowed to happen now! When I got to The Falcon, we moved all the pub-team trophies to one side and put the European Cup in pride of place behind the bar after everyone had held it.
“Everyone was queuing up at the pub payphone to ring around and tell their mates to come down and see the European Cup. The next morning, I was woken up by Peter Robinson asking where the cup was. The reason was because it was needed at a press conference at Anfield. Thankfully, even though I was bleary-eyed, I’d remembered to take it home with me.”
That instinct to ferry the trophy to friends and loved ones is a common impulse. It’s how the cup ended up at the grave of venerated coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi in 2003, for example. AC Milan forward Andriy Shevchenko felt he owed his mentor a debt after so nearly firing Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv team all the way in 1998/99, and here was the next best thing.
“I took the Champions League trophy to Kyiv because we came very close to playing the final and, with a bit more luck, and maybe a bit more experience, we could have won,” the Ukraine star explained, Lobanovskyi having passed away the previous year. “I knew it was his dream and, when I won, I felt he’d done a lot for me.”
Likewise, Celtic manager Jock Stein had one man in his thoughts after beating Inter in the 1967 final, the first outing of the current, redesigned trophy. Once back in Glasgow, Stein was quick to present the spoils of victory to Jimmy Gribben – the club scout who had brought Stein to Celtic from Llanelli in 1951, when the then defender feared he was destined to return to life as a coal miner. “What a wonderful thing that Gribben should be there last night to share in the glory and that the great-hearted Stein, hard on the outside but soft and considerate at the core, should remember him with the bear-like hug,” wrote the Scottish Sunday Express. “This was the pay-off to a perfect night.”
Fittingly, given Stein’s past down the pits, the manager and his Lisbon Lions also paraded the trophy around Celtic Park on the back of a coal lorry – one of the stranger homecoming celebrations in European Cup history but all the more quintessential for it. Think of it as a mathematical equation: the less glamorous the parade, the more jarring the sight of club football’s greatest prize. Either way, giving the fans back home a look at the trophy is an integral part of the experience, and it certainly stuck with Dietmar Hamann when an exhausted, elated Liverpool team returned from the ‘Miracle of Istanbul’ in 2005, even if the cup they wielded had a dented handle after (as folklore has it) Milan Baroš dropped it while cavorting on a piano.
“Bringing the trophy back for the first time in 21 years was just why you play the game,” explained the German midfielder. “When you look at people from five years old to 90 years old in the face – some of them had tears running down their cheeks – that’s what sticks with you. That was probably the most memorable moment I take from those few days in Istanbul and then on the way back. That’s what makes it so special.”
Special too are the personal reflections. The pubs, clubs and piano hijinks might be primo headline fodder, but the most touching trophy tales are the realisations of a private dream. Take Javier Zanetti, for instance, who captained Inter to glory in 2010, a full 18 years after beginning his senior career. “When I lifted the trophy, lots of memories came to mind,” said the Nerazzurri veteran. “All my years at Inter, which ultimately led me to being able to lift that trophy as captain. I was finally able to make all my fans happy, and that, for me, is priceless.”
There is one celebration which undoubtedly stands out above the rest, however – the cathartic triumph of Éric Abidal’s trophy moment in 2011. It was a near miracle that the Frenchman was even involved, Barcelona’s left-back having undergone surgery on a cancerous liver tumour just over two months prior to the showpiece. Not only did Abidal recover, he played all 90 minutes of the 3-1 win against Manchester United at Wembley, and Barça skipper Carles Puyol duly accorded him the honour of raising the trophy first.
“He gave me the captain’s armband and said it was me who had to lift it to the sky,” Abidal later revealed. “He told me he’d spoken with everyone, with the other captains, the coach. At the beginning, I didn’t want to because I respect those players a lot, and I knew what this meant to the club. He helped me. It was something that impacted me on every level. It fills me with great pride to tell myself I was part of this group of players who’ve had the opportunity to lift that trophy ‘as a captain’.”
Perfect. Even those ancient Greek warriors would surely have dropped their shields and applauded that
It’s one of the Champions League’s most infamous superstitions. When your team walks out for the final, however tempted you might be, however shiny it may look, DO NOT TOUCH THE TROPHY. Don’t even think about it. You haven’t earned the right, and merely to brush it with a fingertip would be an act of bewildering arrogance begging for punishment by the fates. Instead, exercise a little self-control, find a way to win the game… and then grab that glittering prize with both hands.
No wonder things can get a little crazy once Ol’ Big Ears has been secured.
Phil Thompson remembers exactly how itchy he felt at the end of the 1981 showpiece. A tense, long season of hard work had finished in triumph and the Liverpool captain was eyeing up the trophy like a magpie. And who can blame him? The post-match ceremony may seem like a symbolic flourish, but Thompson was about to engage in a tradition dating back to ancient Greece, when tropaion, victory monuments fashioned from weapons and armour, were erected on the battlefield. Or, as he put it, “Give me the f***ing cup – this is my moment!”
That was no inner monologue either. The Reds had just beaten Real Madrid 1-0 at the Parc des Princes and Thompson was desperate to lift the silverware, only for some suited older gentleman to get his hands on it first. “When I went to collect the cup,” he told the Daily Mail, “this UEFA dignitary started to lift it himself rather than let me pick it up … I think he was a bit taken aback by the swearing, but it worked.”
So invested was he in the celebration that Thompson even calculated the best way to show the trophy off for the cameras. “You realise you need to lift it low down on the ears and then lift it so it gets your beaming smile,” he said – a stark contrast to his team-mate David Fairclough, who regrets not milking the limelight after the 1978 decider. “I wish I’d held it a bit more as I don’t have that many pictures of me with the European Cup,” the forward later explained. “It’s so heavy that, after a game, you’d have been knackered and it’s just, ‘Pass it on. I am not hogging it because the bloody thing weighs a ton.’”
The heft of the object itself (7.5kg, to be precise) is also a lingering detail for Aitor Karanka, a three-time Champions League winner with Madrid. “The memory we all have of when you pick up the European Cup is how much it weighs,” he told Champions Journal. “When you hold it, the weight of what it means comes together with the physical weight, and it does surprise you. Most of the time, because of the weight or the fact we all wanted the cup, you’d have two of us carrying it together. You go passing it around, and to hold that trophy in front of the fans and your family, it’s the culmination of a dream. I get emotional just thinking about it.”
Karanka recalls embracing the trophy after the 2000 final at the Stade de France, and its plump curves provoked a similar gesture from Henrik Larsson at the same stadium six years later – possibly a natural reaction in the so-called ‘city of love’. “I remember walking out and giving it a kiss before Puyi [Carles Puyol] lifted the trophy,” said Larsson, the Swedish striker having come on to help Barcelona turn the tide against Arsenal. “I actually have a painting back home from when I’m leaning forward and kissing it.”
So far, so respectable, but once the trophy leaves the stadium… well, anything can happen. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but I took it with me to the VIP Room,” is how Ludovic Giuly tells the tale of that same evening in 2006, Barcelona’s French winger having hauled the silverware on a clandestine venture to a swanky Parisian nightclub. “[The owner] Jean-Roch is a friend of mine, and I’d promised him I’d bring the entire squad to his club if we won. So not only did I bring the squad, but I brought the trophy too. A couple of players were still in their kits.” And nor was this the first time the trophy had visited a lively hotspot in the French capital, a few Liverpool players having dragged it along to the Moulin Rouge in 1981 – “to show the dancing girls”, in Thompson’s words.
Where the trophy ultimately winds up after the party is the stuff of legend too. Once the last song has been played and all the champagne quaffed, someone needs to take care of it until morning. For years, the story was that Steven Gerrard slept with it in his bed after Liverpool’s remarkable comeback in the 2005 final, but he has since insisted their night together was far more chaste. “It was in the same room as me,” he said. “It wasn’t in the bed with the quilt on it, but it was in the room, so… however you want to read into that, really.”
In contrast, former AC Milan CEO Adriano Galliani has been more forthcoming about his own dalliance with the cup in 1994 – and having almost lost it while he and coach Fabio Capello put a boozy cap on their 4-0 defeat of Barcelona. “Capello and I stayed up late, drinking bottles of wine, and we forgot about the cup,” he said. “We were in the elevators and we spotted it in a garbage bag. A maid must have put it in there. We brought it back to the room, I put it in my bed and I slept beside it. I told my wife the next morning that it was the most beautiful sleep I’d ever had.”
If that was a close call, Liverpool feared they actually had lost the trophy in 1981.
“It wasn’t missing – it was always in safe hands,” comes the retort from that man again, Phil Thompson. The Reds skipper had been rebuked for leaving the English League Cup on the team bus two months before, and club secretary Peter Robinson told him he should have taken it home. “So, when we won the European Cup, I didn’t need telling twice.”
Maybe… but that doesn’t explain why Thompson took it on a detour to his local pub once the squad had paraded the silverware around the city. “I threw the European Cup in the boot of my car, a Ford Capri. I drove to Kirkby and went to The Falcon, where I used to run the Sunday League football team. Imagine that being allowed to happen now! When I got to The Falcon, we moved all the pub-team trophies to one side and put the European Cup in pride of place behind the bar after everyone had held it.
“Everyone was queuing up at the pub payphone to ring around and tell their mates to come down and see the European Cup. The next morning, I was woken up by Peter Robinson asking where the cup was. The reason was because it was needed at a press conference at Anfield. Thankfully, even though I was bleary-eyed, I’d remembered to take it home with me.”
That instinct to ferry the trophy to friends and loved ones is a common impulse. It’s how the cup ended up at the grave of venerated coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi in 2003, for example. AC Milan forward Andriy Shevchenko felt he owed his mentor a debt after so nearly firing Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv team all the way in 1998/99, and here was the next best thing.
“I took the Champions League trophy to Kyiv because we came very close to playing the final and, with a bit more luck, and maybe a bit more experience, we could have won,” the Ukraine star explained, Lobanovskyi having passed away the previous year. “I knew it was his dream and, when I won, I felt he’d done a lot for me.”
Likewise, Celtic manager Jock Stein had one man in his thoughts after beating Inter in the 1967 final, the first outing of the current, redesigned trophy. Once back in Glasgow, Stein was quick to present the spoils of victory to Jimmy Gribben – the club scout who had brought Stein to Celtic from Llanelli in 1951, when the then defender feared he was destined to return to life as a coal miner. “What a wonderful thing that Gribben should be there last night to share in the glory and that the great-hearted Stein, hard on the outside but soft and considerate at the core, should remember him with the bear-like hug,” wrote the Scottish Sunday Express. “This was the pay-off to a perfect night.”
Fittingly, given Stein’s past down the pits, the manager and his Lisbon Lions also paraded the trophy around Celtic Park on the back of a coal lorry – one of the stranger homecoming celebrations in European Cup history but all the more quintessential for it. Think of it as a mathematical equation: the less glamorous the parade, the more jarring the sight of club football’s greatest prize. Either way, giving the fans back home a look at the trophy is an integral part of the experience, and it certainly stuck with Dietmar Hamann when an exhausted, elated Liverpool team returned from the ‘Miracle of Istanbul’ in 2005, even if the cup they wielded had a dented handle after (as folklore has it) Milan Baroš dropped it while cavorting on a piano.
“Bringing the trophy back for the first time in 21 years was just why you play the game,” explained the German midfielder. “When you look at people from five years old to 90 years old in the face – some of them had tears running down their cheeks – that’s what sticks with you. That was probably the most memorable moment I take from those few days in Istanbul and then on the way back. That’s what makes it so special.”
Special too are the personal reflections. The pubs, clubs and piano hijinks might be primo headline fodder, but the most touching trophy tales are the realisations of a private dream. Take Javier Zanetti, for instance, who captained Inter to glory in 2010, a full 18 years after beginning his senior career. “When I lifted the trophy, lots of memories came to mind,” said the Nerazzurri veteran. “All my years at Inter, which ultimately led me to being able to lift that trophy as captain. I was finally able to make all my fans happy, and that, for me, is priceless.”
There is one celebration which undoubtedly stands out above the rest, however – the cathartic triumph of Éric Abidal’s trophy moment in 2011. It was a near miracle that the Frenchman was even involved, Barcelona’s left-back having undergone surgery on a cancerous liver tumour just over two months prior to the showpiece. Not only did Abidal recover, he played all 90 minutes of the 3-1 win against Manchester United at Wembley, and Barça skipper Carles Puyol duly accorded him the honour of raising the trophy first.
“He gave me the captain’s armband and said it was me who had to lift it to the sky,” Abidal later revealed. “He told me he’d spoken with everyone, with the other captains, the coach. At the beginning, I didn’t want to because I respect those players a lot, and I knew what this meant to the club. He helped me. It was something that impacted me on every level. It fills me with great pride to tell myself I was part of this group of players who’ve had the opportunity to lift that trophy ‘as a captain’.”
Perfect. Even those ancient Greek warriors would surely have dropped their shields and applauded that
